Facebook is known for making changes; as most of you have noticed, there was a recent alteration to the Facebook messenger app. Chad and Adam wanted to clear up some of the confusion that you might be experiencing when it comes to which functions and features you can get in the core Facebook mobile app versus branching out and using the Facebook messenger app. Watch today’s Daily Brown Bag to learn insights about the Facebook messenger app and how this change is impacting user experience.
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Hello and welcome the Daily Brown Bag. Today we are going to be talking about some recent changes that Facebook made to their mobile app. I am Chad Hill and I am joined by Adam Stetzer.
Good afternoon Chad and welcome to The Brown Bag. Facebook has a very, very successful mobile app. Probably one of the most successful Chad. There are over a billion users who use Facebook in any given month via a mobile device and about 200 million of them are using the Facebook messenger app. There has been some confusion over which functions and features you can get in the core Facebook mobile app versus branching out and using the Facebook messenger app. The Facebook messenger app has been around for a while but they haven't forced people to break out and use it specifically because a lot of features have been in the core Facebook app but that has been changing recently and that's the news we are covering today.
There have been little notifications recently saying it's time to install the Facebook messenger app, but those have been pretty easy to ignore until very recently where Facebook is making a big push. This is dusted up a little bit. People are worried about what their losing, what their gaining. There is some controversy here Chad. What can we enlighten our users about here?
As you said Adam, I think this really comes down to Facebook probably looking at their market and trying to make a product that doesn't get too confusing. We know that the more features you add into things the more complex it gets but there might be some other things going on here as well. I think really the ruffling of the feathers, if you will, is happening for a couple of reasons. One is because, to date this app hasn't been very well received and in fact it has been fairly low, in fact it has kind of a low rating on the different app stores.
The second one is that anytime you install a new app that is asking you for all these permissions to your contact list, to your camera and various other microphone and various other things. People get a little worried about privacy. I think the third one is that people just in general don't like change and this is a big change. This is much to do about nothing or there's something bigger going on here. I think the bigger thing could just be that Facebook really is looking again to deliver the best user experience possible. As I said, the more complexity you add to the things the more complicated so they probably want to break these things apart but there is a lot of other stuff going on in the industry.
They recently acquired Snapchat, there's sort of these messaging platforms de jour out there that are popping up and then going away equally quick and I think Facebook is looking at that messaging feature and wants to own that as much as possible instead of letting the next Snapchat come along if they have to go out and acquire for an obscene amount of money. I think that again functionality is still the same, they would probably add some nice new features maybe voice and some other things that are maybe coming down the road but I believe that this is more on the much to do about nothing Adam.
Okay, well there you have it. If you want to continue mobile chatting in Facebook, you would need to get the Facebook messenger app and that's different than how it's been. Where the function of it used to be, as Chad said, bound in the core Facebook app, so this would be a change. We would be interested in your comments. Do you think this Facebook messenger app is a step forward? Is it making things less complex? Drop us a note we would love to hear from you and of course we hope you would subscribe so we can see you at a Brown Bag real soon.